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Oscar Wilde - Poetry
This is perfectly
true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why
it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a
practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already
in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing
conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects
to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and
foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will
change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that
it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The
systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature,
and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV. was that
he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his
error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result. All the
results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.
It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any
sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want
because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is
merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man
with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out
of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the
differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that
is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life
quickens. And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the
contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be
exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows
that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop
Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To
ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution
is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution
except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it
is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.
Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has been pointed
out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is
that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple
meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their right
signification. What is true about Art is true about Life. A man is
called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in
doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in
such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's
neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will
probably be extremely stupid. Or a man is called selfish if he lives in
the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of
his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is
self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to
live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's
lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at
creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness
recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it,
acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A
man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly
selfish to require of one's neighbour that he should think in the same
way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will
probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to
require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because
it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all
the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Under
Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and
will know the meanings of the words, and realise them in their free,
beautiful lives. Nor will men be egotistic as they are now. For the
egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will
not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has
realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it
freely and spontaneously. Up to the present man has hardly cultivated
sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with
pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but
sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with
egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of
terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be
as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It
is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of
life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and
beauty and energy and health and freedom. The wider sympathy is, of
course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness. Anybody can
sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine
nature--it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist--to
sympathise with a friend's success.
In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such
sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral
ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent
everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.
Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of the
first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the higher
animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be remembered
that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world,
sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. It may
make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with
consumption does not cure consumption; that is what Science does. And
when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the
problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened,
and the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous. Man
will have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others.
For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop
itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through
pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of
the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society
absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became peopled
at last. And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is often
an impoverished personality that he so realises. Upon the other hand,
the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise
himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow
speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk
about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is
rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and
beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.
Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its
wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its
whipping with rods--Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval
Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world,
and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of
living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The
painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with
another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother's arms,
smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble,
stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him
crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had
inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted
them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the
loveliness of this lovely earth. They painted many religious
pictures--in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type
and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art. It was the result of the
authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their
soul was not in the subject Raphael was a great artist when he painted
his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant
Christs, he is not a great artist at all. Christ had no message for the
Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance
with his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to
mediaeval art. There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely
to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment,
because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous
soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor
health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain.
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It was
necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation.
Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is
necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his
perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised
themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, hecauae
its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for
those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the
actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who
lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must
either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth
developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows
authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he
realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian
ideal is a true thing.
And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the
imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the
ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its
violence by any violence of his own. He had, as I said before, no scheme
for the reconstruction of society. But the modern world has schemes. It
proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It
desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It
trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an
Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be
larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been. Pain is
not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a
protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When
the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have
no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but
it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day.
Nor will man miss it. For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither
pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely,
fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on
others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to
him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure
is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in
harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for
whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be
perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not,
except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed
them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise
completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It
will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection.
The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.
_Reprinted from the 'Fortnightly Review,' by permission of Messrs
Chapman & Hall. _
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? The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www. gutenberg. org
Title: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Author: Oscar Wilde
Posting Date: July 10, 2008 [EBook #301]
Release Date: July, 1995
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL ***
Produced by Faith Knowles and an Anonymous Volunteer
THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL
By Oscar Wilde
In Memoriam
C. T. W.
Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards.
Obiit H. M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire,
July 7th, 1896
Presented by Project Gutenberg on the 99th Anniversary.
Contents:
Version One
Version Two
Version One
I.
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
"That fellow's got to swing. "
Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved
And so he had to die.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty place
He does not sit with silent men
Who watch him night and day;
Who watch him when he tries to weep,
And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.
He does not wake at dawn to see
Dread figures throng his room,
The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny black,
With the yellow face of Doom.
He does not rise in piteous haste
To put on convict-clothes,
While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows.
He does not know that sickening thirst
That sands one's throat, before
The hangman with his gardener's gloves
Slips through the padded door,
And binds one with three leathern thongs,
That the throat may thirst no more.
He does not bend his head to hear
The Burial Office read,
Nor, while the terror of his soul
Tells him he is not dead,
Cross his own coffin, as he moves
Into the hideous shed.
He does not stare upon the air
Through a little roof of glass;
He does not pray with lips of clay
For his agony to pass;
Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek
The kiss of Caiaphas.
II.
Six weeks our guardsman walked the yard,
In a suit of shabby grey:
His cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay,
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every wandering cloud that trailed
Its raveled fleeces by.
He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair:
He only looked upon the sun,
And drank the morning air.
He did not wring his hands nor weep,
Nor did he peek or pine,
But he drank the air as though it held
Some healthful anodyne;
With open mouth he drank the sun
As though it had been wine!
And I and all the souls in pain,
Who tramped the other ring,
Forgot if we ourselves had done
A great or little thing,
And watched with gaze of dull amaze
The man who had to swing.
And strange it was to see him pass
With a step so light and gay,
And strange it was to see him look
So wistfully at the day,
And strange it was to think that he
Had such a debt to pay.
For oak and elm have pleasant leaves
That in the spring-time shoot:
But grim to see is the gallows-tree,
With its adder-bitten root,
And, green or dry, a man must die
Before it bears its fruit!
The loftiest place is that seat of grace
For which all worldlings try:
But who would stand in hempen band
Upon a scaffold high,
And through a murderer's collar take
His last look at the sky?
It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!
So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.
At last the dead man walked no more
Amongst the Trial Men,
And I knew that he was standing up
In the black dock's dreadful pen,
And that never would I see his face
In God's sweet world again.
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other's way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.
A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men were we:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.
In Debtors' Yard the stones are hard,
And the dripping wall is high,
So it was there he took the air
Beneath the leaden sky,
And by each side a Warder walked,
For fear the man might die.
Or else he sat with those who watched
His anguish night and day;
Who watched him when he rose to weep,
And when he crouched to pray;
Who watched him lest himself should rob
Their scaffold of its prey.
The Governor was strong upon
The Regulations Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called
And left a little tract.
And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman's hands were near.
true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why
it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a
practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already
in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing
conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects
to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and
foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will
change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that
it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The
systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature,
and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV. was that
he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his
error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result. All the
results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.
It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any
sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want
because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is
merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man
with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out
of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the
differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that
is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life
quickens. And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the
contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be
exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows
that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop
Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To
ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution
is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution
except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it
is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.
Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has been pointed
out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is
that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple
meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their right
signification. What is true about Art is true about Life. A man is
called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in
doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in
such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's
neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will
probably be extremely stupid. Or a man is called selfish if he lives in
the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of
his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is
self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to
live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's
lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at
creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness
recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it,
acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A
man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly
selfish to require of one's neighbour that he should think in the same
way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will
probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to
require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because
it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all
the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Under
Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and
will know the meanings of the words, and realise them in their free,
beautiful lives. Nor will men be egotistic as they are now. For the
egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will
not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has
realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it
freely and spontaneously. Up to the present man has hardly cultivated
sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with
pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but
sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with
egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of
terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be
as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It
is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of
life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and
beauty and energy and health and freedom. The wider sympathy is, of
course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness. Anybody can
sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine
nature--it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist--to
sympathise with a friend's success.
In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such
sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral
ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent
everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.
Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of the
first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the higher
animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be remembered
that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world,
sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. It may
make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with
consumption does not cure consumption; that is what Science does. And
when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the
problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened,
and the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous. Man
will have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others.
For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop
itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through
pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of
the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society
absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became peopled
at last. And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is often
an impoverished personality that he so realises. Upon the other hand,
the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise
himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow
speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk
about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is
rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and
beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.
Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its
wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its
whipping with rods--Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval
Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world,
and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of
living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The
painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with
another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother's arms,
smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble,
stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him
crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had
inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted
them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the
loveliness of this lovely earth. They painted many religious
pictures--in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type
and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art. It was the result of the
authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their
soul was not in the subject Raphael was a great artist when he painted
his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant
Christs, he is not a great artist at all. Christ had no message for the
Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance
with his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to
mediaeval art. There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely
to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment,
because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous
soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor
health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain.
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It was
necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation.
Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is
necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his
perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised
themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, hecauae
its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for
those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the
actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who
lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must
either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth
developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows
authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he
realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian
ideal is a true thing.
And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the
imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the
ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its
violence by any violence of his own. He had, as I said before, no scheme
for the reconstruction of society. But the modern world has schemes. It
proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It
desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It
trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an
Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be
larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been. Pain is
not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a
protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When
the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have
no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but
it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day.
Nor will man miss it. For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither
pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely,
fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on
others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to
him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure
is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in
harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for
whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be
perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not,
except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed
them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise
completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It
will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection.
The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.
_Reprinted from the 'Fortnightly Review,' by permission of Messrs
Chapman & Hall. _
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? The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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with this eBook or online at www. gutenberg. org
Title: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Author: Oscar Wilde
Posting Date: July 10, 2008 [EBook #301]
Release Date: July, 1995
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL ***
Produced by Faith Knowles and an Anonymous Volunteer
THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL
By Oscar Wilde
In Memoriam
C. T. W.
Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards.
Obiit H. M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire,
July 7th, 1896
Presented by Project Gutenberg on the 99th Anniversary.
Contents:
Version One
Version Two
Version One
I.
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
"That fellow's got to swing. "
Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved
And so he had to die.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty place
He does not sit with silent men
Who watch him night and day;
Who watch him when he tries to weep,
And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.
He does not wake at dawn to see
Dread figures throng his room,
The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny black,
With the yellow face of Doom.
He does not rise in piteous haste
To put on convict-clothes,
While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows.
He does not know that sickening thirst
That sands one's throat, before
The hangman with his gardener's gloves
Slips through the padded door,
And binds one with three leathern thongs,
That the throat may thirst no more.
He does not bend his head to hear
The Burial Office read,
Nor, while the terror of his soul
Tells him he is not dead,
Cross his own coffin, as he moves
Into the hideous shed.
He does not stare upon the air
Through a little roof of glass;
He does not pray with lips of clay
For his agony to pass;
Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek
The kiss of Caiaphas.
II.
Six weeks our guardsman walked the yard,
In a suit of shabby grey:
His cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay,
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every wandering cloud that trailed
Its raveled fleeces by.
He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair:
He only looked upon the sun,
And drank the morning air.
He did not wring his hands nor weep,
Nor did he peek or pine,
But he drank the air as though it held
Some healthful anodyne;
With open mouth he drank the sun
As though it had been wine!
And I and all the souls in pain,
Who tramped the other ring,
Forgot if we ourselves had done
A great or little thing,
And watched with gaze of dull amaze
The man who had to swing.
And strange it was to see him pass
With a step so light and gay,
And strange it was to see him look
So wistfully at the day,
And strange it was to think that he
Had such a debt to pay.
For oak and elm have pleasant leaves
That in the spring-time shoot:
But grim to see is the gallows-tree,
With its adder-bitten root,
And, green or dry, a man must die
Before it bears its fruit!
The loftiest place is that seat of grace
For which all worldlings try:
But who would stand in hempen band
Upon a scaffold high,
And through a murderer's collar take
His last look at the sky?
It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!
So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.
At last the dead man walked no more
Amongst the Trial Men,
And I knew that he was standing up
In the black dock's dreadful pen,
And that never would I see his face
In God's sweet world again.
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other's way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.
A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men were we:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.
In Debtors' Yard the stones are hard,
And the dripping wall is high,
So it was there he took the air
Beneath the leaden sky,
And by each side a Warder walked,
For fear the man might die.
Or else he sat with those who watched
His anguish night and day;
Who watched him when he rose to weep,
And when he crouched to pray;
Who watched him lest himself should rob
Their scaffold of its prey.
The Governor was strong upon
The Regulations Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called
And left a little tract.
And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman's hands were near.
